Happy Birthday, Mr. Director!

March 18, 2015

It was great seeing John at the Charleston club.

A foreboding winter weather forecast adversely affected participation at the February meeting. However, John Fultz, director of the Champaign Scrabble Club, and his spouse, Julie (an excellent physician, avid knitter, and wonderfully kind human being) managed to make a round trip journey to Charleston from their home in St. Louis that day! This was perhaps not too surprising since John is a very hardy fellow, who commutes from St. Louis to Champaign each week in order to fulfill duties related to his job at Wolfram and to play at the Scrabble club on Thursday evenings at the Barnes and Noble bookstore just north of Rt. 74 by Neill Ave. It was great to see John and Julie as well as Della Lutz, a newly certified NASPA club director, who very capably assists John in directing the Champaign club. Mrs. Director, Daiva Markelis, and local area players Cheryl Hawker, Jacqui Wordon, Mary Maddox, Ranji Adukia, and Stevie Momaly were also on hand to play and to help celebrate the birthday of Mr. Director, Marty Gabriel.

Cheryl had an awesome day!

Cheryl’s entry of REX took top prize in the “Marty descriptive word” category. Rex, she wisely pointed out, means “king”. I must admit that Martysaurus Rex is rather appropriate and oddly amusing. In the “M and/or G high word” category, Daiva took top honors with her 94 point bingo, MISDOER. She was savvy enough not to include that among the Marty descriptive word entries. Many more prizes were awarded, but these were the most notable winning entries.

Epic game between Marty and John.

Interesting bingos included the sheepishly played FELLATIO and HOLDOUT by John! Mary played DONATION and HELPERS (for 100 pts.) and charitably allowed Cheryl to successfully play a phony word for 140 pts! Ranji played the very acceptable, CANTEENS, but she also played two other phoneys. One of these was against Stevie, who prevailed over Ranji by a score of 341-332 anyway. By the way, Stevie also won the only other game she played 419-315! She was aided in that game by a phoney of her own making, PELTINGS, which is acceptable in international (CSW) play only. (The anagram PESTLING is acceptable world-wide.) Della played BOOGIES, SENARII, and QUESTING! And Martysaurus Rex roared out DETRUDES, HYALINES, OTALGIES, and PAVONINE as he devoured his competition and trampled his way to victory in all four of his games.